Traditional food of Guinea-Bissau: 12 dishes to know

Bissau-Guinean food is rice with a caldo, a stew of peanut, palm oil or okra cooked with fish, chicken or goat, seasoned with chilli and Guinea pepper. It mixes West African cooking with Portuguese touches from the colonial era. The most emblematic dishes are caldo de mancarra, caldo de tchebem, sigá and cafriela de frango, with cashew juice to drink.

Updated 2026-10-124 min read

What Bissau-Guinean food is built on

Rice is the staple, above all on the coast and in rural areas, while millet is more common inland. Most traditional meals are rice served with a soup or stew, a caldo, made with fish, meat, vegetables or a peanut sauce. Fish usually goes with the traditional sauces, and seafood, shrimp and shellfish play a large part along the Atlantic coast and the river networks.

The other ingredients are cassava, sweet potato, yams, plantain, beans, black-eyed peas, onion and tomato. Palm oil and peanuts, called mancarra, are the two great sauce bases; the Portuguese pushed peanuts and cashews as cash crops, and cashews are still grown for export. Chillies and the seeds of Aframomum melegueta, Guinea pepper, give the heat. Milk, curds and whey are eaten too, and three meals a day is the norm.

The caldos: stews over rice

• Caldo de mancarra — Peanut stew, the best-known dish of the country: peanuts crushed to a paste with tomato, thinned and sieved, then simmered with chicken, goat, beef or fish until creamy. Okra, cassava and piripiri chilli are optional additions. It is served with white rice or rice cakes and is the local form of the West African maafe.
• Caldo de tchebem — Also spelled caldo de chebeu: a fish stew made with palm fruit extract, okra and vegetables, served with rice.
• Caldo de citi — A stew built on palm oil, which Portuguese-language references list among the traditional dishes and pair with malagueta chilli. It can be cooked with smoked catfish.
• Sigá — A sauce of palm oil and okra with meat or fish, eaten over white rice.
• Djambo — Sweet potato leaves stewed with peanuts and beef or chicken.
• Caldo branco — The "white" caldo: a fish stew served with rice.

Rice and chicken dishes

Other everyday dishes include arroz de cabra, rice with goat meat; canja, a chicken and rice soup with aromatics; futi; and moni, a sweet corn flour porridge.

• Jollof rice — Rice steamed in a tomato stew fried until the oil separates. Guinea-Bissau shares it with the rest of West Africa, and also knows riz gras, "fat rice", the variant of French-speaking West Africa made with short-grain rice.
• Arroz com iogurte — Also called badadji: rice with plain yoghurt, often served with palm oil.
• Cafriela de frango — Chicken marinated with lemon, garlic and spices, then grilled or stewed.

Pastries, sweets and drinks

The cashew fruit, not only the nut, is used: sumo de caju is its juice, and canjira, or vinho de caju, is the fermented, alcoholic version. Palm wine is drunk at gatherings, sumo di cabaceira is baobab juice, sumo di ondjo is made from hibiscus flowers, and warga is sweet green tea. Baobab and hibiscus are also frozen into sorvete di cabaceira and sorvete di ondjo, and thiakry, millet couscous with fermented milk or yoghurt, is eaten as a dessert.

• Pastel — A savoury fried pastry filled with tuna, listed among the pastries with rissóis, small fried pastries filled with shrimp.
• Fidjós — Fried fritters made with banana. Donetes, small fried dough pastries, are their doughnut-like cousins.
• Canhã — A sweet made from ground peanuts, part of a family of sweets that also includes doce de amendoim (peanut) and doce de papaya.

Portuguese and Cape Verdean heritage

Portuguese colonisation, from the 15th century to independence, introduced new crops, seasonings and techniques that were absorbed into local cooking rather than replacing it. Dishes popular across the Portuguese-speaking world are eaten in Guinea-Bissau too: feijoada, bacalhau com natas, pudim, and bolo de bolacha, a no-bake cake of biscuits soaked in coffee.

Copper's Bissau-Guinean collection reflects that double heritage. Catchupa, the hominy and bean stew, is the national dish of Cabo Verde, the archipelago to which Guinea-Bissau is tied by its Portuguese-speaking past. Caldo verde is the potato and collard green soup of the Minho region of northern Portugal. Neither is native to the country, which is why they are not counted among the 12 dishes above.

Food at celebrations

Meals are shared with family, guests and neighbours, and hospitality is part of the food culture. Traditional dishes are cooked for weddings, births, circumcision ceremonies and funerals, usually with palm wine and other local drinks. On 12 September, the birthday of independence leader Amílcar Cabral, celebrations can include yassa, chicken with mustard, citrus and onion. Carnival in February, Independence Day on 24 September and New Year are other occasions for big shared meals.

Cook Bissau-Guinean food at home

Caldo de mancarra is the dish most often named as the national dish of Guinea-Bissau. Copper's recipes for jollof rice, catchupa and caldo verde, with ingredients and step-by-step methods, are on our page about the food of Guinea-Bissau, and the mainland neighbours are in our guide to West African food.

Compare with the traditional food of Senegal, which shares the rice and peanut dishes, and the traditional food of Cabo Verde, which shares the Portuguese side.

The recipes

• Jollof rice🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau · 1 hour and 35 minutes
• Catchupa🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau · 16 hours and 25 minutes
• Caldo verde🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau · 45 minutes

Questions people ask

Keep reading

• What is the national dish of Guinea-Bissau?
• Traditional food of Benin: 13 dishes to know
• Traditional food of Burkina Faso: 11 dishes to know
• Traditional food of Cabo Verde: 13 dishes to know
• Traditional food of Côte d'Ivoire: 12 dishes to know
• Traditional food of The Gambia: 13 dishes to know

Sources

1. Bissau-Guinean cuisine — Wikipedia
2. Cuisine bissau-guinéenne — Wikipédia
3. Culinária da Guiné-Bissau — Wikipédia
4. Caldo de mancarra — Wikipédia
5. Caldo de Mancarra / Chicken with Peanut Stew — FunTimes Magazine
6. Jollof rice — Wikipedia

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